Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Capcom looks toward big changes after difficult FY13 | GamesIndustry International

I'll let you read the article yourself, but here's some food for thought.

GTA V is presently worth more than Capcom's bank account is. The development and marketing of GTA V is estmated at $256 million, $105 million more than Capcom has in the bank and GTA V has already made that money back on pre-orders alone.

And while Capcom appears to be done chasing the coattails of Call of Duty, they're still trying to scale the steep mountain to success in the mobile gaming goldrush. That and they're sticking to their guns on the kinds of DLC that drove many fans away in the first place.

I'm sitting here with my mind blown and wondering where all that sweet, sweet MonHun cash went to. I guess its little surprise why they're going with 3DS as the safe bet for Monster Hunter 4, but if Pokemon X/Y manages to beat out MH3U and MH4 in launch sales, perhaps the popularity of that IP has run its course. Aa it stands, i think Animal Crossing New Leaf outsold MH3U before either left Japan.

Megaman in Smash Bros WIi U/3DS looks more faithful to the IP than anything Capcom has done lately. Then we have Inafune's Mighty No. 9, which continues to make waves and fans consider the torch passed before before the game really even has gotten started.

Capcom scaling back and ceasing to outsource games is probably wise in light of DmC and now Lost Planet 3, which released to meh reviews - but they still think they're on the past to the future when it looks more like the path to destruction.

Perhaps they could stand to learn something from Rockstar, Atlus, Nintendo, Inafune and just do what they like rather than trying to chase western trends, the mobile market and piecemeal DLC. With them, SE and EA all seeing big losses this year it certainly is time for all of them to go back to the drawing board, perhaps reflect on and reconnect with their past a bit.

[Malacite]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

Oh yeah this, The 100,000 Strong for Bringing Back MML3 facebook group posted it a few days ago.


I'll simply repeat what I said before: fuck 'em, they're dead to me. They stupidly ruined all their best franchises, left the fans jaded and pissed off their 3 best developers to the point where they've all left and started up their own (very successful) studios (Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya & Keiji Inafune) so let them suffer the consequences. SE damn near followed suit but seems to be correcting themselves, at least as far as FFXIV goes - XV remains to be seen, but is at least looking good (Lightning Returns actually shows a bit of promise because of the battle system, but I wouldn't hold my breath).


Megaman in Smash is a nice touch, but he should have been in Brawl, especially given that Brawl came out during the Wii's peak popularity. I'm honestly at the point now where I don't give a rat's ass if they do make a new Mega Man game - it won't have Inafune involved, and as much as I adore MM - MM2 was the 1st game I ever played and it's the one series I hold nearest & dearest to my heart - I have a deep, seething hatred for the company and want to see them crash and burn, far more than even Activision.


Just look at Mighty No.9 - it's already past $2 million in support. Capcom has horribly misread their fanbase and is rightly paying the price. Sure, Dragon's Dogma was neat, and the DmC reboot wasn't horrible (at least the gameplay was solid if nothing else) but it's too little too late. The weird thing is, while in a similar situation to Sonic, Mega Man isn't quite suffering the same problem. Whereas SEGA drove a beloved franchise into the ground with increasingly worse sequels (save perhaps for Colors), Mega Man fans have been starved for games. Oh sure, we got Star Force (meh) and the ZX series (also meh) but both of those tanked. MM9 and 10 were cute, but where was the real PS3/360 generation title? It never came.


No, instead we got MML3 cancelled after 10 long years of waiting, and a retarded slap in the face trolling in SFxTekken with the stupid North American boxart Mega Man. Oh yeah, there was also Universe & the Korean MMO that both got cancelled (the MMO was actually looking good too from the early footage).


So no. I honestly think it'd be best at this point to just sell off their IPs and close shop ala THQ. Maybe SE could pick up Breath of Fire & do something decent with it - then again, they haven't touched SaGa, Mana or Grandia in ages (at least not with any good games.)

[cidbahamut]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

I think all I really care is that if they go under the IPs all end up in the correct hands rather than going down with the ship.

[Malacite]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

As long as none of their IPs ever go to EA or Activision.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

So no. I honestly think it'd be best at this point to just sell off their IPs and close shop ala THQ. Maybe SE could pick up Breath of Fire & do something decent with it - then again, they haven't touched SaGa, Mana or Grandia in ages (at least not with any good games.)

Yes, let's hand over Breath of Fire to SE, who would also just bastardize the series with an iOS game anyway. SE just filed a trademark for Deus Ex Universe and just that name alone does not give me a good feeling. That suggests either an MMO or another bastardized mobile game like DX: The Fall. SE followed up a successful reboot with a game where none of the people who made the game successful would play it. No, you don't make a first-person stealth action game into a touch driven experience.

Not that I'm too keen on Breath of Fire, BoFV wasn't really that great.

Ace Attorney could go to Level 5 or Intelligent Systems/Nintendo and I think either could do the series justice.



Nintendo could do Megaman well, but they'd probably just iterate it once or twice per platform and Megaman was an annualized whore for the longest time. WayForward, just based on Ducktales Shantae and Mighty Switch Force would also do right by the series, but I doubt they'd be able to afford the IP even though they could probably crank it out quickly. Yacht Club Games could do it, too, they practially are with Shovel Knight.

Street Fighter, Darkstalkers and Final Fight... hard to imagine Capcom not doing those, really, but I guess Namco or Sega might be the right fit. Final Fight with Sega, anyway. It would give the Yakuza team something else to do while avoiding Shenmue.

Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe and Okami to Platinum Games, obviously, though perhaps Nintendo for Okami. Platinum's starting to sound like a good fit for Nintendo in general, they're practically a temporary second party studio right now and loving it.

Dunno if From Software could ever afford it, but Dragon's Dogma, Resident Evil and Monster Hunter kinda suit them... but that would take focus off what they do well.

Or someone could just buy all of Capcom. That would be easier.

[Icemage]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe and Okami to Platinum Games, obviously, though perhaps Nintendo for Okami. Platinum's starting to sound like a good fit for Nintendo in general, they're practically a temporary second party studio right now and loving it.

LOLwut?

Wonderful 101 bombed in Japan when it released (~6K sales in its first week), and it's probably going to bomb everywhere else too.

Platinum is lucky Nintendo is probably footing most of the bill for Bayonetta 2, but Platinum are probably kicking themselves over missing the next gen boat and betting on Wii U at this point, as I doubt Bayonetta 2 is likely to recoup its development cost either.

Capcom will probably be OK in the short term. Dead Rising 3 will likely sell fairly well as an Xbox One exclusive (timed? maybe). Monster Hunter 4 is going to sell gangbuster millions in Japan.

Long term, they definitely have some issues, but I don't see them having too much in terms of immediate difficulty.


Icemage

[Armando]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

Nintendo could do Megaman well, but they'd probably just iterate it once or twice per platform and Megaman was an annualized whore for the longest time.

I'd argue that's precisely what the franchise needed. During peak whoring Capcom could throw out three canon Mega Man games in a single year (X, Zero and Battle Network). If you were a fan and wanted to keep up, odds are you blew all your money on Mega Man games. If you didn't, you'd have a lot of catching up to do - enough that you might decide just to drop the series altogether. If you had a passing interest in the series, you were faced with not knowing which universe you wanted to check out, and then you'd have to decide if it's worth to catch up with the history of that universe.

Mega Man's history up to 2009

Hell, they could generate some buzz just by giving the classic, X, Legends, and ZX series a proper ending.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

Seems like if Capcom can't whore it, they abandon it. Its more or less the template Activision, EA and UbiSoft run on now.

So yeah, maybe Nintendo's way would be better. As it is I'd love to see what they could do with the look they created in the next Smash Bros. I'd argue the representation was actually more faithful than some of their core characters. Sakurai and his team just nailed every little nuance of the 8-Bit style in full 3D.

[Malacite]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

Technically wasn't the original series all the way up to ZX one continuous timeline/universe?


Though I maintain that X6's Zero ending was the real canon as it makes the most sense leading into MMZ. Would be nice of them to tie up the various loose ends however from each series (and then there was that nonsense in X5 Sigma spouted at X about Wily somehow still being around).


If Konami hadn't dropped the ball so badly with Silent Hill, I'd be tempted to recommend they be the ones to pick up the RE license but no.


Honestly, I think Deep Silver might be an interesting fit at this point. Does 4A Games still exist under them or have they gone away entirely in the wake of THQ's downfall? I'm not sure and I wanna know, because Metro 20330 and Last Light were very good, and spooky enough in their own way that I could see them doing an RE game.

[Armando]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

Technically wasn't the original series all the way up to ZX one continuous timeline/universe?

Yup, but none of the series in that universe actually had closure, except for Mega Man Zero. Classic, X, and ZX are still open-ended and both X and ZX are on cliffhangers.

Sakurai and his team just nailed every little nuance of the 8-Bit style in full 3D.

Agreed. I prefer Smash Bros's 3D model over the one they used in Mega Man Powered Up; though that might be an unfair comparison since Powered Up was for PSP. Although I think I like Shantae's approach of 2D-on-3D background even better.

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

saw profits fall by more than half to just $31 million.

As distressing as the author makes it sound, it's still a $31 million profit--as in Capcom isn't worrying about electricity getting cut off at its HQ or reusing coffee grind to pinch pennies and yens.

Not that Capcom couldn't (or shouldn't) do better, but it may be a tad too early to worry about who will get which morsel off of Capcom's still-presently-hypothetical carcass.

May want to wait until, oh, maybe two years of red ink or at least an year of bloodbath. In the mean time, you people who can smell bankruptcy in black ink should start shorting Amazon stock--it lost $USD 7 million in the second quarter, after all. A bonafide, soon-to-crash-and-burn business, right?

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

Fact is Capcom has loads and loads of IP that they could be profiting for them now, but apparently they're not and squandering what they do put out. If they can have a phenomenon like Monster Hunter on their hands and their on-hand cash is less than a small fry like Atlus is worth on the auction block, they're a poorly managed company on the path to ruin.

All we have to do is turn back the clock 15 years, look at the music industry and see the self-destructive behavior Capcom and others are engaging in. They have committed to fighting the future by perverting current technology to keep profiting the old way. Its what the recording industry did.

If they're lucky, they will survive as some record labels did, but it won't come without the cost of being a lead player in the market. Either they'll go under or become less relevant compared to businesses who will treat gamers with respect. Sony displayed this kind of hubris multiple times and they're still paying for it now.

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

Fact is Capcom has loads and loads of IP that they could be profiting for them now, but apparently they're not and squandering what they do put out. If they can have a phenomenon like Monster Hunter on their hands and their on-hand cash is less than a small fry like Atlus is worth on the auction block, they're a poorly managed company on the path to ruin.

It's true Capcom can (and should) be doing better, but I was mostly rolling my eyes at the title claiming it's close to being in deep financial trouble given the article OP pointed to says Capcom is profitable, with increased revenue.

Cash balance is a useful indicator, but not by itself. (And, may not even indicate what the general public thinks it indicates.) We should be looking at debt load, cost of servicing debt, revenue, and, yes, profit, if we want to get a sense of the viability of Capcom.

Beyond having immediate operating fund, a company's ability to continue as an ongoing concern is its short term borrowing capability--most non-tiny businesses run normal business expenses on borrowed fund to prevent having to keep a big pile of cash around.

Huge amount of money sitting in an account isn't working to make the company better; spending that money wisely to make more money is the capitalist's mantra. (That Capcom has smaller cash hoard than expected can a bit of a concern, but that really depends on what it has been spending its Yen on, and if those investments are working out.)

* * *

Disclaimer: I don't care all that much about Capcom one way or another (with the caveat that I keep claiming I want to learn how to play SF4), so this is strictly an exercise in common sense for me.

[Icemage]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

It's also worth pointing out that we're at the start of a new console cycle. Companies tend to invest heavily right as each new console generation begins, so there's good reason to believe that Capcom isn't doing as poorly as one might think.

They may make terrible decisions with their IPs due to poor management (Street Fighter, DmC, wtf-why-did-Lost-Planet-need-a-third-iteration, and of course especially Mega Man), but they still retain a stable of powerful IPs (Monster Hunter, Resident Evil, Dead Rising, Sengoku Basara) and they're still investing in new ones (Dragon's Dogma, Deep Down, Remember Me). I don't agree with many of their decisions, but that's not the same as saying they're going under any time soon.


Icemage

[Firewind]

Re: Capcom is close to being in deep financial poop

Lost Planet 3 basically bombed over here. Not sure about Europe as a whole but the UK stopped caring about Lost Planet after the abomination that was LP2.

For anyone interested in the current UK sales charts: Saints Row IV holds off Rome II, Diablo III for UK number one | GamesIndustry International

Yes Tomb Raider is still up there, it and Dynasty Warriors are basically Cash Cow Franchises in the UK.

To get back on topic. Capcom is still $31million in profit, and it is the start of a new console cycle. Money sitting there and not being invested is useless. More concern should be cast on the companies that are sitting on their bank accounts as a lack of investment in new things is something that makes people feel that they have a massive lack of confidence in their abilities to create a profit for the next few years.

We should wait a year or two, then see how things are going.